


Intersections: Dawn of Fate

by Caedus501



Series: Intersections [1]
Category: Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel - James Luceno, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Glacially Slow Burn, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 10:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10092089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caedus501/pseuds/Caedus501
Summary: If Kay-Tu were here with him he’d be telling Cassian that the odds of successfully completing his mission were 46.8% higher with properly forged documents.  He knew when to concede the point.“Fine.  The market square, tomorrow, eighteen hundred hours.”“Brilliant!” the girl said and began to make her way toward the door.“Hey, one last thing,” Cassian called to her as an afterthought.  She stopped and turned to him waiting.  “What’s your name, really?”Her gaze turned calculating for a moment, then cleared.  “Dawn.  Kestrel Dawn.”***Jyn is a slicer making a living in the fringes of space.  Cassian is a Rebel spy doing what he can to give the Rebellion an edge in the ongoing war. The two unknowingly meet each other a couple years before the events of Rogue One and are forced to rely on one another to evade the Empire.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is meant to be the first in a three part series that explores what Cassian and Jyn were doing with their various aliases prior to meeting one another for what they are in a dim war room on the Rebel base on Yavin 4. I am also going to sprinkle in all kinds of things from Legends canon because I refuse to let all those characters and stories in the back of my head go to waste.
> 
> I have goals for this series. Let's see if I meet them. Feel free to leave comments, questions, or concerns, they are appreciated!
> 
> Enjoy!

_Intersections_

_Part 1: Dawn of Fate_

 

**Approximately 2 BBY**

The blasterfire was hot and quick at his back as Cassian sidestepped into another offshoot alleyway, pulling his companion along with him.

“Well that went downhill fast,” Tam said as they retreated down the dim passage away from the pounding footfalls that followed them.  “I think it’s time for plan B.”

“Do you have a plan B?” Cassian asked between breaths.

“No, but it’s definitely time for it,” Tam responded helpfully.

All Cassian could do was grunt in frustration as they hurried down another new pathway.  He was looking for an open door or window they could bolt through, but everything seemed to be shut tight.  He couldn’t even see a way to get to the rooftops.  All the buildings were smooth durasteel and had no outcroppings or balconies for the first five levels above their heads.  It seemed they were stuck trying to outrun the Stormtroopers at street level and on foot.  All Cassian and Tam had going for them was the never-ending warren of dank and narrow alleyways and the fact that the troopers’ armor was loud and bulky causing the noise of their passage to reverberate through the artificial canyons between the buildings.  What Cassian and Tam really needed was to find an outlet onto a busy street so they could get lost in a crowd.

“I think plan B is to get the hell off this planet,” Cassian said as he ran.

“Without what you came for?” Tam asked.

“This was clearly a set up.  There was never any intel.  We each wasted a trip.”

“Dammit!” Tam exclaimed bitterly.  If this was a wasted journey for Cassian who had made a last minute side trip at the behest of his superiors as he made his way to the Core, then it was worse for Tam.  He’d had to burn a deep cover identity at an Imperial research facility to get here, to Toprawa, for the possibility of information that would fill in some rather large gaps in the Alliance’s understanding of the Empire’s weapons development program.  A source somewhere in the sector had come forward with evidence that showed a tenuous connection between the work coming out of the Imperial installation that Tam had been stationed at and research that was rumored to be occurring on a base on Toprawa, all of which was part of something much larger.  Whatever false trail the Empire or some bounty hunter or, gods forbid, Black Sun, had laid down was good enough to fool the best of the Rebellion’s intelligence directors and nearly got both Tam and Cassian killed.  Or worse, captured.

Either that or General Draven and Senator Mon Mothma were desperately grasping at straws trying to find anything that could give the Alliance an edge in this war.

Another few minutes of evading the pursuing Stormtroopers through the twists and turns of Toprawa’s backways and suddenly Cassian and his companion found themselves in the midst of a crowded pedestrian thoroughfare.  Cassian instantly changed his gait to match those of the people on the street, then he snagged a blue coat from an outdoor store display and slipped it over his shoulders.  Beside him, Tam had hastily reversed his jacket, turning it from dark to light, and adopted a slight limp.  At least Cassian assumed the limp was fake, but he couldn’t be positive.  The troopers that spilled out of the alley behind them were forced to split up to search in every available direction.  Cassian and Tam hunkered into their impromptu disguises as white clad figures unknowingly rushed past them down the street.

With the immediate danger past Cassian’s thoughts kept returning to one problem.  He had to get off this planet soon, but to do that…

“I need new scandocs,” he said to Tam in an undertone.

“What? Why?”

“Because those Stormtroopers somehow had my name,” Cassian grimaced at the prospect.  “I suspect we have our friend who didn’t show to thank for that.”  Of course all they really had was an alias, one of many.

“Oh, come on, Aeris,” Tam said, using the only name that he knew Cassian by.  “There are ways to get to the City Central Hangar without passing any of the security checkpoints.”

“Yes, but then what?  I have to take registered transport to get out, which means I need papers.”

“You don’t have your ship?” Tam looked aghast at the concept.  “Why the hell don’t you have your ship?”

“I just don’t!  The whys of it are not your concern!” Cassian said sharply, his voice rising unconsciously.

“Alright, alright,” Tam said with a placating gesture.  “I’m sorry I asked.”

They walked along in silence for several minutes, subtly checking that they weren’t being followed.  For all intents and purposes, it seemed as if they had completely lost their Imperial pursuers.

It wasn’t until they passed a window display of in-home entertainment units that Tam put out an arm to bring Cassian to a stop.

“You know,” he began with a thoughtful expression, “There’s a slicer here whose name is making the rounds in the sector.  She’s supposed to be really good.  One of the best.”

“Is she trustworthy?” Cassian asked as he watched the reflections of passersby in the window.

Tam let out a snort.  “As trustworthy as anyone who makes their living off crime.”

That was true enough.  The real question was, _how desperate was Cassian?_   He knew he had a specific timeline for his next mission and the longer he spent on Toprawa the greater the odds that his mission would fail before it even started.  He supposed that made him pretty desperate.

“Alright,” he said sighing.  “Who is she and where do I find her?”

“Go to the Black Bantha over on the west side of the city and ask for Aurora.  Someone there should be able to get you in touch with her.”

“Tam, how do you even know that?  You’ve barely been on this planet longer than I have.”

The other man winked conspiratorially.  “I keep my ear to the ground wherever I am.”

“But that was incredibly specific.”

“What can I say?” he shrugged. “I pick stuff up when I’m in bars.  That is the way of things.  Of course, I never manage to pick up what I actually want in a cantina. Women are baffling creatures.”

Cassian fought to keep his eyes from rolling and settled for looking unimpressed.  In all honesty, however, where else would you find a slicer but in a bar?  He probably could have found one in any cantina in the city, but he needed the best if he was going to make it offworld in one piece.

“Fine.  What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Me?  I’ve just got off a year and a half deep cover infiltration op _and_ I’ve just been shot at.  I think I deserve a little R and R, don’t you?”  Tam smiled grandly and slapped Cassian on the back before turning away.

A single bark of rare laughter escaped Cassian’s mouth as he watched the man slip away, blending effortlessly into the crowd.

 

***

The interior of the Black Bantha Café and Lounge was not at all deserving of the title “café” in Cassian’s opinion.  It was dimly lit and the air smelled of slightly-off spices and cheap ale.  Even in the early afternoon this place looked like the memory of long nights spent looking for answers at the bottom of a glass.

It was exactly the kind of place Cassian hated.

Trouble lurked in every corner in this type of dive and every ear in the joint was sharply attuned to any information that could earn a quick credit if sold to the right people.  It was certainly not ideal for a clandestine meeting with a slicer of any caliber.  Still, he didn’t really have any better options.

He made his way carefully to the sparsely populated bar and positioned himself in a corner near a wall so that he only had to watch two angles of approach for possible threats.  There were two people behind the counter: one was a big guy with the green tinged skin, bright eyes, and tattoos of a Mirialan far from home, and the other was a young woman, a girl really, who looked barely old enough to be in a place like this, let alone serving alcohol to leering drunks. 

But who was he to judge?  When he had finally made his way to the Rebellion at the age of ten, no one had expected him to have even handled a blaster before. When he immediately showed himself to be a crack shot the sergeant in charge of his training had looked at him in a whole new light.

Cassian asked the Mirialan for a Corellian whiskey – he felt he deserved it after being shot at and chased halfway around the city – when the large man came to gruffly ask what he wanted.  While he slowly sipped his only-slightly-more-palatable-than-engine-oil whiskey, Cassian gave the room another careful survey before deciding he might as well do what he came here to do.  There was no use in wasting good credits and quite possibly a year off his life due to the swill he was drinking for nothing.

The next time the Mirialan came near his end of the bar Cassian snagged his attention with a gesture.  “Hey, I’m looking for someone named Aurora.  I heard she worked here?”

The man’s eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he thought about it.  In the background near the sink Cassian saw the girl pause in her washing and turn slightly toward him.

“No one here by that name, buddy,” the Mirialan eventually admitted in an accented Basic.

Cassian tried not to show his disappointment.  He knew that this was how it always began.  The pro forma denial of knowledge of the asked for information, then Cassian would have to offer a bribe of some kind, and only then would he get some scrap of intel.  It was all so tiresome.

“Hey Lim,” the bright voice of the girl at the sink said, breaking through Cassian’s thoughts.  “Why don’t you let me handle this.”  She wiped her hands on a dingy towel and made her way over to Cassian’s corner of the bar.  The Mirialan, Lim apparently, stared at the girl hard for a moment, then shrugged and went to see to his other customers.

She quickly studied Cassian’s face and seemed to come to a decision. “If you’re looking for Aurora, I can get a message to her.”

Cassian very nearly ignored the pert, auburn haired dishwasher. It was incredibly unlikely that such a young girl would be involved with the slicer, but maybe she didn’t know what this Aurora actually did with her time. Despite his better judgement, something urged him to hear her out.  “I thought the big guy just said there was no such person?”

The girl shrugged and gestured lazily back at Lim, who was now engaged in conversation with a harried looking twi’lek.  “He’s new and doesn’t know that there was in fact an Aurora who worked here up until six months ago.  Seriously, I can comm her if you want.”

Cassian was definitely suspicious of her willingness to help.  He hated the regular extortion for information that passed as standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering, but this outright cheerful and cooperative behavior was equally disturbing.  “Why would you do that for me?” he asked.

“Because you said you were looking for her,” the girl said, looking confused at Cassian’s sudden skepticism.  “It’s really not a big deal.”  She pulled a comlink off her belt and held it warily before her as she gave Cassian a questioning look.

He pursed his lips considering the possible consequences, but quickly decided that the girl looked too baffled to be up to any real mischief.  He gave her a consenting nod.

She took a few steps away from him and keyed in the appropriate comm code.

“Hey, Rora? It’s Kestrel.  Listen, I’ve got a guy here…” her voice trailed off as she stepped into a back room to complete her conversation.  Cassian would have preferred to hear the whole thing, but he understood that most people didn’t like their private calls listened in on.  He usually paid no mind to such social conventions, he was an intelligence officer after all.  He made his living by eavesdropping on other peoples’ conversations.

“Yeah, I get it,” came the voice of the girl as she reappeared behind the bar a minute or two later.  She came to stand in front of Cassian as she finished up her call and openly appraised him where he sat.  “Trust me, Rora.  I think you’re going to want to meet this one.” She clicked off and stowed her comlink without taking her eyes off him.

Cassian raised an eyebrow in response and waited for the girl to tell him whether or not he had made it through the slicer’s mysterious vetting process.

“She says she’ll meet you at 1800 in the Blue Skies.  She’ll be the one with her boots on the table,” she said, smirking

“Eighteen hundred,” he repeated back to her as confirmation.  He considered asking where the Blue Skies was, but decided that would make him look too vulnerable and out of place.  Besides, he apparently had time to find the location on his own.  He dug a few credit chips out of his pocket and left them next to his empty glass then got up to go.

“Hey buddy,” she stopped him, arms crossed over her chest and her tone serious.  “It was five for the drink, but twenty for the messenger service.”

Cassian grimaced and rolled his eyes at her demand.  Her methods may have been unorthodox, but the endgame was the same.  Information for money.  It was unfortunate that it somehow made him less suspicious of the girl’s motives.  “Here,” he said and slapped another chip on the counter.

The girl smiled brightly at him and pocketed the extra twenty credits.  “It’s been a pleasure to serve you,” she said before walking back to the sink and her washing.

           

***

 

In a rare turn of events, Cassian suddenly found himself with three hours to kill before his meeting with Aurora.  Free time was not something he had a great deal of experience with, nor was he terribly fond of it.  He got anxious when he wasn’t actively working for a space of time over an hour, it just felt like such a waste to put his feet up and relax.  The quiet of hyperspace during travel between missions was generally all he needed to recharge.  So, instead of sitting idle in yet another cantina in the city, he decided to do something useful with his time.  He needed to contact Base One and let them know about what had happened on Toprawa before he got bogged down on his next mission anyway.

As he searched out a public comm terminal and simultaneously kept his eyes open for the Blue Skies, he composed the message in his mind.  He had no way of sending a secure tight-beam communiqué to the Alliance from a public terminal, but he could send an encrypted, coded message to a drop.  From there it would be forwarded through several different comm arrays spread throughout the galaxy before reaching headquarters.  Such precautions helped to hide both the origin point and the final destination of the message from all but the most dedicated of prying eyes.  He debated phrasing in his head as he walked, trying to find a way to say as much as possible in as few well-chosen phrases as he could manage.

By the time he found a terminal and paid the necessary amount for its use, his final message read:

 

_The party was a bust.  Turns out most of those invited were really not my crowd.  I highly suggest avoiding any events thrown by the host of this shindig in the future. –X27-PO2_

Overall he was pleased with the result.  It sounded sufficiently innocent and mind numbing to fly under the radar, but he knew Draven had done more with less in the past.  The number at the end, a seemingly random comm code, was actually one of his identifiers within Alliance Intelligence.  He used it rarely enough that it shouldn’t attract any unwanted attention.

With that task done he had nothing else to do but slowly make his way toward his meeting with the slicer.  He wandered at a leisurely pace, examining the wares on display in the storefronts on the street.  He tried to make himself look as inconspicuous as possible since there were Stormtroopers openly patrolling the streets.  Cassian emphatically disliked being unable to keep his hand on his blaster with so many troopers nearby who may or may not still be looking for him.

He got to the Blue Skies about half an hour early thinking to scope out the place before Aurora got there so that he could be sure of his exits should things go south.  Either the slicer had anticipated him or she had wanted to be sure of her perch before Cassian found her, because as soon as he walked in he spotted a young woman seated at a low table off to the side of the room with her feet up on the table.  Cassian did a visual sweep of the room to be sure that this was definitely his contact before slowly making his way over to her.  The Blue Skies was about as different from the Black Bantha as possible.  Where the Bantha had been a malodorous dive in a cheap rent district, the Blue Skies was a prim, atmospherically lit cantina featuring clusters of tastefully arranged chairs and couches and several tables with colorfully upholstered stools.  It was not at all what he had expected for a private conversation with a criminal.

Or maybe not.

The person at the table was not an unknown slicer, but rather the girl from the Black Bantha that had supposedly set up this meeting for him.  She sat there casually with her boots on the table, a drink in hand, one eyebrow raised, and a cryptic– no the word was _smug_ – a smug smirk playing about her lips. 

“Are you kidding me or did she send you with a message?” he asked incredulously.

She didn’t say anything in answer to his query. She just waited for Cassian to come to his own conclusions.

“I see,” he said when he eventually realized that this… _girl_ is the Aurora he had pinned the hopes of his current exit strategy on.  And she _was_ just a girl.  A couple of years his junior at the very least and even sitting down he knew she barely reached his shoulder in height.  Her face still held a bit of the roundness of youth while her grey-green eyes were sharp and bright. She counterintuitively wore bright, primary colors that seemed to scream _look at me!_ paired with practical dark trousers and an easy-to-reach blaster in a holster on her thigh.  Her hair was a strange red color that leaned heavily toward brown.  No matter what the color was called by people who cared about such things, Cassian _did_ note that her eyebrows were another color entirely, which suggested she had dyed her hair.  Not an unusual act in and of itself, but factor in her apparent nighttime career as a slicer and it was likely that the dye job was meant to obscure her identity.

“Are we going to talk or are you just going to stare all night?” the girl asked interrupting Cassian’s study of her.  “Come on, I’ve got things to do.”

“Do you have a name?”

“I do.” She didn’t elaborate.

Fair enough.  He caught part of a name earlier in the day anyway - Kes something- but it wasn’t absolutely necessary for him to know it for them to do business.  “Is it safe?”  He asked warily, eyeing the patrons nearby.  They were in a public place, which meant there was every chance that someone was going to overhear their conversation.  The fancy surroundings didn’t change that basic fact.

“Safe as life,” she commented.

Cassian took that to mean, _Of course it’s not safe you idiot, but this is what we got so look sharp._

“So, what is it you need?” the girl asked while he sat down across from her at the low table.

“Well,” Cassian paused, considering how to answer in such a way that he won’t give anything away to anyone who may happen to be listening in.  “I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation to Kuat.”

He watched as her eyes widened almost imperceptibly in what was probably disbelief.  “What does a fancy Core world have that Toprawa doesn’t?” Yes, she definitely thought he was crazy.

“Oh, you know, bustling city life, good shopping, fancy ships.  The works.”

Her eyes narrowed as she heard his answer.  Cassian could tell she was trying to figure out what he was up to.  Kuat was very firmly in the Empire’s grasp, especially as they were one of the main producers for the Imperial Navy.  The Kuat Drive Yards was in fact the very reason he was heading there in the first place.  The Rebellion wanted better intelligence on what updates and modifications were being made to the ships of the Imperial Fleet, any new ships of the line or technologies they may be developing, and definitely a better numbers count.  It was all information that would make the Alliance better able to confront the Empire in open engagements.

Of course, the girl didn’t need to know any of that.  Just as she didn’t need to know that from Toprawa he would actually be stopping off on Carida and switching identities yet again before making his way to Kuat. She just needed to know that whatever documents she made him had to pass muster on a Core world with a heavy Imperial presence.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” she said, still looking dubious.  “Maybe we should start at the beginning with your name?”

Cassian thought carefully about what name to give the slicer.  It certainly couldn’t be the name he would be using for his assignment once he was activated on Carida.  Perhaps he could use one of the names he gave out a lot but didn’t have proper documents for.  Then he would have them at the ready for the future.  If they were any good that is.

“Aach,” he told her.

“Aach,” she repeated flatly, clearly trying to hide her judgment.

“Yes. Aach Penn.”

The girl’s eyebrows were definitely judging him now.  They showed severe skepticism.  Cassian let his face remain impassive as he stared her down for half a minute until she shrugged and said, “Sounds like a real upstanding citizen.”

Cassian couldn’t contain a huff of laughter at that comment.  Not much of what he’d done under that name could be classified as “upstanding.”

“Well, Mr. Aach Penn, I can tell you with authority that your hair and uh,” she paused searching for the right word, “scruff are a bit long to be considered strictly fashionable in the Core right now.  You going to do something about that?”

Cassian took a moment to marvel at the skill the girl showed in asking that question.  It served as both a warning about the Imperial presence on Kuat, which he was already well aware of, and a query about his general appearance and whether or not he was going to change it to assume the identity she was creating.  There would have to be a holoimage attached to the scandocs, that was standard, and since he currently had no way to insert a picture of himself no matter what he looked like, she would have to make do with a picture of him as he appeared now.  Cassian also suspected the question was a not quite subtle attempt at finding out what he would be doing while in the Core.

He ran a hand through his hair, considering, then shrugged slightly.  “I’ll probably give it a trim.  You don’t think the, what did you call it, scruff? The scruff doesn’t work?” he asked, half joking.  Cassian actually planned to cut his dark locks to meet Imperial Army and Navy regulations and give himself a thorough shave prior to leaving Toprawa.  Not only would it help if there was anyone still looking out for him in the city, but he had a very specific cover for his time on Carida and Kuat and he had to look the part.

Again, however, the slicer didn’t need to know that.

The girl looked at him with her head cocked to one side, a thoughtful expression on her face as she mulled over the question of scruff.  “It really depends on the look you’re going for.”

“As long as I don’t come across as a vagabond, I think I’ll be doing fine.”

She continued to watch him, her gaze taking in everything, from his hair to his scuffed up boots.  Cassian wondered what she saw as she studied his dark utilitarian trousers, Rebellion standard issue shirt, non-descript khaki jacket, and the BlasTech 180 blaster holstered at his side. The blue coat he’d acquired earlier was cleverly tied around the straps of the small bag of supplies over his shoulder.  After several quiet moments all he seemed to warrant from her was a noncommittal “hmm…”

Cassian had no idea what that meant so they continued to stare each other down, each refusing to telegraph their thoughts, until a thin waitress came around to pick up the girl’s now empty glass.  She offered to get “Aurora and her friend” another drink, but she was waved off with an impatient gesture from the slicer and an expressionless look from Cassian sent her off with a dispirited huff.

Finally the girl –Cassian flatly refused to call her Aurora since he knew she went by a different name in her daylight hours –removed her boots from the table and leaned forward to brace her forearms on her legs so that she could peer intently into Cassian’s face.  Cassian got the distinct impression that she was trying her best to read him and uncover everything he was hiding.  It wasn’t for nothing that he was in Alliance Intelligence, however, Cassian knew how to reign in his thoughts and emotions so that nothing showed.  Even Draven said he had trouble getting a read on Cassian Andor.  This girl didn’t have a chance of figuring him out.

“Kuat is a long way from here,” she began slowly, “Are you planning on stopping anywhere on your way to the Core?”  She had returned to her list of questions pertinent to making a false ID. 

Once again Cassian had to carefully consider his answer.  The slicer wasn’t asking about his trip to Carida, she was asking what to list as his planet of origin.  “I was considering taking in the sights on Alderaan before I get entrenched in the big Kuati cities.”  Alderaan wasn’t exactly a halfway point in terms of hyperspace routes since the two were practically next to each other in the Core, but that wasn’t the point anyway.

“Alderaan?” she asked, her entire face suffused with doubt.  “Are you sure?”

He knew why she was so disbelieving.  His native Festian accent didn’t sound anything like the clean, polished Basic they spoke on Alderaan.  That, however, was a challenge easily overcome.  “Oh yes.  Have you ever been?” he asked, rounding out his vowels, shortening his ‘R’s, and annunciating very carefully.  “I hear the north of the planet boasts some spectacular scenery.”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” she said, her eyes wide and eyebrows high in surprise.  “I doubt anyone would suspect you of being a tourist though.”

Cassian had to work to keep a smug grin off his face at the compliment.  He knew his Alderaanian accent was good, Senator Organa had said so himself.  About a month and a half ago, when Draven had first started dropping hints about a possible deep cover operation in the Core, Cassian had sat down with the Viceroy of Alderaan in the mess hall of Base One for several hours to perfect his accent.  After about three hours, Organa had to leave to attend a meeting of the High Council, but by that time a recently defected Corellian pilot by the name of Wedge Antilles had joined them.  Wedge offered to coach Cassian on his Corellian accent while Organa was occupied.  Cassian was grateful for the help, but didn’t want to hold the man up.  X-wing pilots had a tendency to get antsy if they sat in one place for too long.

“Nah, they’re just checking the cargo,” Wedge told him when Cassian asked if he had something else he needed to be doing.  Apparently the pilot was currently serving as a gunner on a freighter while he healed from a crash injury.  There was a painful moment for Cassian when he realized that due to a miscommunication, he had been at least partially responsible for the incident that broke Wedge’s leg in three places when the pilot was apparently instructed to fly his fighter into the side of a volcano.  Still, the man sat with Cassian for over two hours discussing a wide range of inconsequential topics and occasionally pointing out errors in Cassian’s pronunciation.

When Organa had come back into the mess to check on their progress, the two men challenged Cassian to switch up his accent depending on which one of them he was talking to and then throw in a Coruscanti accent when he was posing a question of his own.  That exercise only lasted about ten minutes, before both Wedge and Organa were laughing outright and Cassian felt like he had talked his tongue into knots.  The final pronouncement was that his Alderaanian was quite good, but he lacked the necessary swagger (“You mean arrogance?” Organa had interjected during Wedge’s verdict) to sound properly Corellian.  Although, they had both agreed that his crisp Coruscanti accent was the best of the lot.  Cassian had grimaced at that judgement and told them that he didn’t want to sound like an Imperial officer any more often than he had to.

Cassian’s only outward reaction to the slicer’s praise of his Alderaanian tinged Basic was a slight bow of the head in acknowledgement. 

“Well if you’ve made it to, what twenty-three or twenty-four, without seeing the Cloudshape Falls, then you haven’t lived,” said the girl, breaking through Cassian’s memories.  Another fishing question.

“Twenty-four,” he told her, confirming his age so she can find an appropriate date of birth for the papers.  “I’ll be sure to see them during my visit.”

The girl finally seemed satisfied, and leaned back to stretch her arms in the air and gave the room another scan for potential unsavory elements.

“Sounds like a fun vacation,” she said.  “It should all be easy enough to arrange.  For a mere five thousand you can find a tour guide that will take you to all the natural wonders of Alderaan.”

“Five thousand! Are those tour guides out of their minds?”

“Not in the slightest,” she answered, crossing her arms over her chest in defiance.  “Alderaan is incredibly safe these days.  You’re paying for the view, uninterrupted by _lambda_ -class shuttles.  No Rebel insurgents either,” she finished with a calculating look.

No Rebel insurgents? If only she knew.  Then Cassian paused mid-thought, was she actually threating to sell him out if he didn’t agree to her ridiculous price?  How had he not seen this coming?  She had managed to get all the information from him before they agreed on a price.  The slicer didn’t have much on him, but it was enough for some light blackmail.  Wasn’t there some code about honor among thieves?  It was bad form to extort your fellow law breakers like this.

“Two thousand,” he insisted.  “That should more than cover the Cloudshape Falls.”

“That might get you into the mountains, but you’ll be left to hike through the wilds on your own.”

Cassian tried to hide his irritation, but he suspected some leaked through anyway, if her smirk was anything to judge by.  He had limited funds available to him.  The Rebellion’s coffers weren’t exactly overflowing.  He flat out couldn’t afford 5,000 credits.

“Twenty-five hundred,” he said, abandoning all pretense.

She lifted an eyebrow in disdain. “Four thousand.”

“Twenty-seven,” he countered, nearly at the end of his ready money.

She eyed him carefully and seemed to decide something based on the grim expression on his face.  “Make it thirty-two hundred and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

Cassian let the muscles in his shoulders sag in relief.  He nodded once to show his assent to her price.

“Good.  Well that was fun,” she said grinning and holding her hand out so they could shake on it.  “Either you’re really bad at haggling or the bulk of my clientele are complete bastards who have been screwing me over.”

“I suspect the latter,” he said wryly.

Her bright smile stayed on her face as she handed over a datapad.  “Half up-front as per usual, I’m not running a charity here.  A funds transfer to that account there will do nicely,” she said indicating a long number on the screen.  Cassian took the pad warily and slid a credit chit into the reader on the side.  He keyed in the appropriate passwords and credit amounts, but hesitated after he removed the chit.  He glanced swiftly at her smiling face then quickly typed in a command code that would erase his keystrokes from the datapad’s internal log, provided, of course, she hadn’t modified the programming too much.  The girl was a slicer after all, no need to give her more information than she already had.

She nodded in approval as Cassian handed the datapad back over.  “Not nearly enough people think to do that.  I tend to see it as an open invitation for me to take a little extra payment for alerting them to their oversight.”  She stowed the pad and rose from her chair.  “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll find you in the market square around this time tomorrow to make the final exchange.”

“Wait, what?” Cassian asked, alarmed.  “I can’t wait around for a whole day.”

“Then you should have thought of that earlier,” she said, looking completely unapologetic.  “Did you think I would just pull something out of my back pocket all ready to go?”

“No, nothing like that, it’s just…” he trailed off, unwilling to tell her that there may or may not still be Imperial troops after him, or that he was on a schedule.  “Can’t you get it done any sooner?”

She leaned in close and spoke in a barely audible whisper. “Well sure, I could get it to you in a couple hours, but do you really want to risk the troopers not noticing documents that don’t carry an official seal or aren’t properly holomarked?  What if they scan them and the supporting trail on the holonet is so flimsy they spot the fake and arrest you on the spot.  These things take time to do properly.”  She eyed him up and down again, then pursed her lips.  “Besides, something tells me Imperial Prison Camp wouldn’t look good on you.”

Cassian sighed and closed his eyes for a moment.  He knew she was right.  Nevermind the fact that prison camps didn’t look good on anyone, he would be lucky to even end up in one.  If the Empire found out who he really was and who he worked for, the odds were pretty high that he would end up dead after a lengthy and tortuous interrogation process.

If Kay-Tu were here with him he’d be telling Cassian that the odds of successfully completing his mission were 46.8% higher with properly forged documents.  He knew when to concede the point.

“Fine.  The market square, tomorrow, eighteen hundred hours.”

“Brilliant!” the girl said and began to make her way toward the door.

“Hey, one last thing,” Cassian called to her as an afterthought.  She stopped and turned to him waiting.  “What’s your name, really?”

Her gaze turned calculating for a moment, then cleared.  “Dawn.  Kestrel Dawn.”

 

***

Not long after noon of the next day Cassian found himself with sore muscles and hungering for a decent meal after his morning of running about Toprawa City.  He had taken what Tam had said about getting to the City Central Hangar without passing checkpoints to heart and decided to make finding that route his priority.  It had taken him the better part of five hours to establish a workable route.  His explorations during the morning had had him backtracking and circling the city far more often than he had thought he would have to.  The number of Stormtroopers on constant patrol in the city was far beyond anything Cassian had ever experienced on any other Imperial occupied planet.  It was a fact that made him both intensely curious and extremely suspicious.

Cassian had absolutely no idea what was going on inside the walls of the base on the far side of the city that required such a heavy guard.  Toprawa was a small, densely forested planet at the distant end of the Hydian Way in the Outer Rim.  It wasn’t exactly a stop off point for cargo and troops, because there wasn’t much of anything beyond it in the outer reaches of the galaxy.  There weren’t even any natural exports of any value.  Thinking strategically, Cassian could find no reason for the Empire’s diligent watch over the system.  That only left whatever research was going on in the base as the most valuable asset the planet had to offer.

The worst part of coming to this conclusion was that Cassian had no practical way of infiltrating the base to find the answers.  He already had a mission, an important one, and anything happening on Toprawa could end up being a wild bantha chase.

So he had put aside any thoughts of what he might have found out had the meet up originally planned for yesterday had actually happened, and focused on finding a trooper free way to the spaceport.  He wanted to be ready to get offworld as soon as possible once he finished his business with Kestrel Dawn.

Cassian shook his head to try and clear the girl from his thoughts.  He was still somewhat impressed by the slicer, Kestrel Dawn.  There was a fair amount of irritation mixed into the sentiment, but on the whole, he was impressed.  He couldn’t deny the cheek of someone hiding their illegal activities in plain sight.  It had taken him several minutes to figure out why the name “Dawn” was ringing bells in his head, but he got there in the end and it had left him genuinely smiling.  Some long ago lesson or book he had read once explained the languages that had come together to create Galactic Basic.  One of those early tongues had belonged to a planet with a pantheon of gods, one of which was a goddess of the dawn called Aurora.  It had been staring him in the face the whole time. 

Dawn was clearly a young lady of unexpected intelligence.  Not only did the name, or possibly names plural, she had chosen for herself show some sort knowledge and appreciation of either history or linguistics, but the way she had conducted her interrogation showed quick thinking and a mind for detail.  He had left the Blue Skies the night before, not quite in a daze, but in a slight state of distraction thinking that if her slicing was as good as her acting and her covert conversation skills, then he would definitely be getting his money worth.

For the moment, however, he still had a number of hours to fill before meeting Dawn for his scandocs, and the meager meal he had gotten from a street vendor the night before had not filled his stomach for very long.  He had passed by a place called Al the Alchemist’s during his morning jaunt about the city and it seemed promising.  He didn’t want to go back to the Black Bantha, not just because he wouldn’t trust anything coming from its kitchens not to poison him, but on the off chance Kestrel Dawn was working again, he didn’t want her thinking he was checking up on her.

Al’s was a cantina somewhere between the Bantha and the Blue Skies in terms of style and cleanliness, and the midday clientele looked to be mostly day laborers and cargo haulers of some kind.  Overall, it was the most comfortable looking place on Toprawa he’d seen yet, and that included the sorry excuse for lodgings he’d rented for the night.  He ordered some kind of spiced meat dish and settled himself into a corner by a window with a mug of caf to watch the street and Al’s patrons.

The day was damp and overcast in this part of the forested planet, but that didn’t seem to slow down the city dwellers.  They thronged to the streets, seeming not to care about the white armored Imperial troops that walked menacingly among them totting heavy blaster rifles.  Cassian didn’t understand how the people of the city could stomach such a presence disrupting their lives.  He studied the posture and expressions of the pedestrians who passed the window.  He saw how eyes skittered away from the figures in white plastoid and expressions of rage or disgust were quickly tamped down and hidden.  Maybe Toprawa was not as placid as it appeared on the surface.

Nor was Al’s cantina Cassian noted as a cry of “Imperial bastards!” rent the quiet atmosphere.

Cassian turned his attention back to the patrons at the bar when a number of them, including the barkeep, attempted to corral an overly expressive human man.

“Come on, Sheb…”

“Not this again.”

“If you don’t quiet down you’re going to get arrested.”

“I will not keep quiet!” The man, Sheb, called out belligerently.  “They tried to have me killed.  Hell, those bucketheads would like nothing better than to see me dead!”

“Only because you won’t stop yelling at them,” another patron pointed out.

“Damn fools need to be held accountable for their crimes!” Sheb continued.

Cassian could agree with that, but he knew better than to go about yelling such seditious things where anyone could hear it.  The Empire had been known to reward those who reported anyone suspected of being a traitor or who expressed treasonous thoughts.

“Sheb,” the man behind the bar began with a note of warning in his voice, “if you start telling that damn Hypori story again, I’ll kick you out and let the Imps have you.”

Hypori?  That rang some kind of bell in Cassian’s mind, but he didn’t know why.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sheb said, throwing back the last of his drink.  “I was just leaving anyway.”

Cassian hadn’t figured out why Hypori was setting off alarm bells yet, but maybe with a little more context he could.

“What happened?” he barked out to the man as he meandered his way toward the exit, clearly unsteady on his feet.  The drunkard stopped and turned until he found Cassian by the window and squinted at him as though Cassian was out of focus.  Cassian decided to prompt the man’s thinking a bit.  “On Hypori.  What happened?”

“Oh, kriffing hell.” Cassian heard from the direction of the bar.  “Don’t encourage him!”

“Who wants to know?” Sheb asked, still squinting heavily.

Fair question.  Anyone unknown could easily be an Imperial informant.  Cassian put on his best Alderaanian accent and tried to be as innocuous and unmemorable as possible, hoping that no one would notice a discrepancy between his accent now and when he ordered.  Giving a nonchalant shrug he said, “The name’s Aach.  I crew on a freighter out of Bilbringi.  Me and the rest of the crew are grounded while our ship is in for repairs.  Just looking for some entertainment to pass the time.”

“What I got ain’t entertainment, young man,” Sheb said walking slantwise over to Cassian’s table in the corner.  “It’s the cold hard truth.”

“Then tell me.  Why do you think the Empire is after you?”

Cassian heard groans from the few people seated at the bar, but he paid them no mind.

“Because I know things!  Things the Empire doesn’t want spread around.  Information.  Knowledge.  Up here,” he said tapping emphatically at his temple, “I know what they were having us build.”

That seemed ominous, yet vague.  “You mean like ships or droids or something?” Cassian asked for clarification.

“Droids?” Sheb scoffed. “Hardly.  If the Empire had wanted droids they wouldn’t have shut down the Techno Union factory.  No we were doing something much bigger.”

That finally did it for Cassian, now he knew why Hypori sounded familiar.  Somewhere in the back of his memory came a random voice from back in his Separatist days saying there was “a new detachment of droids coming from the foundry on Hypori in a few days.”  Cassian had never had any personal involvement with the planet, but he had assumed that its battle droid factories had been shut down and dismantled by the newly minted Empire just like all the others spread across the galaxy had been.  It was some years later that he had read in some report he found while doing background research on the sector for an upcoming recruiting assignment that some sort of accident had occurred and decimated an entire region of the planet.  He had no idea that at one time there was apparently an Imperial research station on the small, sparsely populated rock.

“What could be bigger than a capital ship?” he asked to try to keep the man talking.

Sheb looked around him, suddenly cautious, before leaning in and lowering his voice so that only Cassian could hear.  “I don’t know.  But Krennic wanted everything on a massive scale. Containment fields, shield generators, laser prototypes, you name it, but all of it for fifty times the usual amounts of power and fifty times the size.”

Cassian frowned at the concept of so much energy.  What was the Empire up to?  Were they building some kind of _super_ star destroyer?  Cassian personally thought the Empire’s signature war ship was deadly enough without needing to be any bigger.  He sincerely hoped the bleary eyed Sheb was lying.

“But what was it all for?” Cassian asked.

“Don’t know.  They never told us.  We just got notes from Erso and had to work his rambling calculations and theories into our tests.” Sheb shook his head in disbelief.  “He was crazy thinking he could get that much power from anything, it was off the charts.”

“Erso?”

“Galen Erso.  Some big shot scientist back on Coruscant.  At least he was.  He disappeared not long after the accident.”

“The accident.  You mean the one that took out a quarter of the planet?”

Sheb eyed him suspiciously, trying to get a better read on Cassian’s face. “No actually, I was referring to my accident.  The event that took out the research facility was no accident, you mark my words.”

Cassian just raised his eyebrows in encouragement to continue.

“We were on the verge of a breakthrough with the energy inducers and finding the right ratio of electrochemical cells for the laser when there was a power surge that discharged into the lab.  One of my colleagues was killed and I was burned badly enough that all I saw was black for days.  The next thing I know I’m waking up a week later on some barely inhabited Outer Rim world and I can’t get in contact with anyone.  A med droid eventually gave me a message from Reeva, she was one of the project heads, saying there had been an accident in the lab and since there were no facilities on Hypori to properly treat such severe burns, she decided to smuggle me onto a ship and off the planet to an unregistered medunit in the middle of nowhere.” Sheb shook his head slightly at the memory and let out a troubled sigh.  “She checked me in anonymously and gave the doctors a fake name for me.  ‘I don’t want the Empire to be able to find you,’ she said in her message.  There was some other stuff about not trusting Krennic and needing to warn somebody, but I don’t really remember.  The point is, when I finally managed to sneak back to the system, the facility and the dismal landscape it sat on were so much ash and dust.  The destruction was too neat to have been natural even for that hellish planet.  No, it was the work of the Empire.  Turbolaser bombardment.  I’d bet my life on it.”

“It kind of sounds like you are,” Cassian pointed out.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you’re telling the truth, then the Empire sure wouldn’t like you bandying about a story like that.”

“If?” Sheb sounded affronted.

“Well, look at it this way, if the Empire were really after you then why live on an Imperial occupied planet and tell the locals about the target on your back.  That seems like a good way to get yourself killed,” explained Cassian.

“The kid’s got a point, Sheb,” Al called from behind the bar.

“I’m keeping an eye on the Empire and the scientists on that base out there!” Sheb said indignantly to the room at large.  “Whatever they’re doing it can’t be good.  Especially if they’re still using Erso’s old research.”

Whoever this Erso character was, he seemed to feature in Sheb’s tale of large scale weapons research and development.  To be frank, Imperial scientists were a dime a dozen these days, apparently weapons design paid well, but if the Alliance could manage to turn one into an asset then they could have an inside line on how to combat the Imperial war machine.  Or if nothing else, depriving the Empire of one of its top researchers might at least slow them down.

Of course, that was assuming anything Sheb had told him was true and Galen Erso was, in fact, real.  And that was a big if.  Had the Empire really been after someone as careless as Sheb, then he’d have been dead long ago.  Which meant Sheb was either lying through his teeth or that Reeva woman who had gotten him offworld and secretly checked him into a medunit had saved his life in more ways than one.  It was likely that Krennic, whomever he was, wouldn’t have even known someone had survived the aerial bombardment.

“It’s an interesting story, that’s for sure.  Especially if it made its way back to the Imperial Senate or,” here Cassian paused, not wanting to garner too much suspicion, “…certain other parties.  Again, if any of it is true,” he finished.

“It is!  It is true!” Sheb said, slapping the table for emphasis.  “You sound just like my colleagues and the officials I tried to warn years ago.  Whose side are you on, boy?” he asked peering at Cassian like he was trying to see through a disguise.

Cassian shrugged again.  “The side that gets me the most money.”

“I thought you said you worked on a freighter.”

“I do.”

“Hauling what, exactly?” Sheb asked, still suspicious of Cassian’s motives.

“Oh, you know,” Cassian began, careful to let a mischievous smile slide over his face.  “A little of this, a few crates of that.”  It was not exactly an innocuous story, but Sheb seemed to need assurances that Cassian was no friend to the Empire.

The man continued to study him closely for a minute, then he let out a bark of laughter that smelled strongly of alcohol.  “That’s right, boy! You give ‘em hell!”  Cassian lifted his mug in toast to Sheb’s command.  “Al!” the man called toward the bar, “You give this boy what he wants.  He’s alright.”

“If you say so,” Al replied skeptically.

“And you,” he continued, pointing at Cassian while he struggled to his feet.  “You tell people what I told you.  Remember, the Imps are up to something and they’re willing to kill their own for it.”

Cassian gave a mock salute to the old man as he made his way out the door, presumably to find some troopers to berate as they patrolled the city.  Cassian briefly wondered how a supposed scientist the Empire once deemed worthy of working on one of their weapons projects wound up a drunk in a backwater hole like Toprawa.  Still, it was hard to think of anyone making up such a story, it would serve no purpose.  There had to be some way of confirming all or at least part of what he’d been told that didn’t feature Cassian slicing his way through the entire Imperial network.

Maybe he could find something on either the woman, Reeva, or the “big shot” Erso.  Scientists often had an academic or research presence on the holonet.  Unless of course the Empire had redacted all works pertaining to the research which had drawn the Imperial eye in the first place.

It was worth a try anyway.  He had nothing better to do at the moment.

Cassian brought his dirty dishes up to the counter and asked the barkeep if he had or knew of a public computer terminal that Cassian could use.  The datapad that he had safely stowed in the small bag he kept slung over his shoulder – along with emergency rations, a small medkit, and an extra power pack for his blaster – was holonet enabled, but if this scientist turned out to be a lead on anything significant, Cassian didn’t want the search traced to him directly.  He only trusted the encryption on his datapad so far.  Better to use a public terminal that anyone could have accessed if something went wrong.

“Yeah, sure,” Al told him, pointing a thumb over his shoulder to the back corner.  “Half a credit a minute for the net.”

Cassian visibly winced at the unnecessarily high price.  Was the story of an old drunk man worth it?

It would be if it revealed a weakness in the Empire’s stranglehold on the galaxy.

He started his search with trying to locate the woman Sheb claimed had saved his life after a lab accident.  Cassian had no luck.  Without a last name or a field of study he couldn’t get far.  Even when he combined “Reeva” with all the modifiers he could think of, the results were either too vast or completely nonexistent.

His efforts for “Galen Erso + energy + scientist” were only slightly more successful.  The name turned up as a footnote in someone else’s article on synthesizing mutable crystalline structures, a topic that seemed ridiculously irrelevant to Cassian.  He tried to look up the referenced Erso article, but found no traces of it on the holonet or in the archive of the journal that had originally published it.

That couldn’t be an accident.

Apparently, the Empire wanted to keep whatever Erso had been working on a secret from the public, aside from those researchers and scientists who already knew.  Cassian debated with himself about how far to take this line of inquiry.  There was one more trick he could try, but it would be risky considering he was on a planet with a heavy Imperial presence.  Of course, it could _only_ work on a planet with an Imperial base or research station, so it was now or never.

He took a deep breath and started opening folders and screens until he found where the terminal was detecting the various holonet signals floating unseen through the ether.  He latched onto the Imperial network and entered a backdoor code that a data technician who had recently defected to the Rebellion had taught him a few weeks ago.  At the time the tech had told Cassian that he didn’t know how long this particular backdoor would be open once his superiors figured out that he’d left and they sorted through the mess he’d made of the terminal at his post.  Cassian had also been warned that using the code could set off alarms in the imperial network even if it appeared to work.  He’d just have to be quick in case they tried to establish a trace on him.

Cassian would have expected an Imperial base to have a closed holonet connection, a network that could only be accessed from inside the base, but then they wouldn’t be able to communicate with the destroyer that patrolled the sector.  Whatever the reason, Cassian was grateful for the lack of caution in this case.

Once he was in, he tried a direct search of the personnel database first, but the results were only for those working at the Toprawa base.  He widened the search and finally!  Finally Galen Erso became a real person.  Although why the Empire had buried a scientist who, judging by the extremely short file, studied fancy rocks so deep in the bowels of Imperial record keeping was beyond him.  The file was mostly limited to Erso’s position as Chief Science Officer, his date of birth, his primary area of study, and his assigned project which was listed as “Celestial Power.”  All further information on Erso was restricted by security clearance.  Cassian tried his access code one more time just to see if it would unlock anymore doors and get him to the good stuff.

Access Denied.

Well, that was that.  He’d have to look into Celestial Power some other time.  It was a good bet that his attempt to access secure data had flagged something in the Imperial system even if his initial incursion into the network hadn’t.           

Cassian quickly cut off his link to the holonet after deleting his history just to be safe.  He used another trick he’d picked up from the data techs to reset the log of the camera he knew came built into a terminal like this one.  Honestly, Cassian never regretted making the effort to befriend the Rebellion data techs.  They were slicers in all but name, thanks to the legitimacy the Alliance gave them, and were happy to share a few tricks of the trade to someone who showed how much their skills were appreciated.  The command protocol he entered would erase the last twelve hours from the video archive which was more than enough to remove Cassian’s visual presence at the terminal.  Hopefully it would all be enough and neither he nor Al the Alchemist would incur any trouble from his near twenty credit jaunt on the holonet.

Evidently, however, hope was for fools.

He had made it not more than four steps from the computer terminal when he spotted two figures in white approaching the entrance to the cantina.  Cassian cursed and immediately retreated to duck around the corner of the counter.  He didn’t know if there was a back way out of the place, and he hated not knowing.  He could see a backroom behind the bar, but he had no way of knowing if it, in turn, opened onto an alleyway. He usually tried to avoid places that only had one exit, but every once in a while creature comforts beat out common sense.  Cassian had wanted a decent meal for once, and now he was paying for it.

The two troopers made their way into the room, did a quick survey of the glowering patrons scattered across the tables and bar, then immediately split up to accost the individuals to their left and right.  A female human with dark hair was brusquely shoved around until she faced the trooper, then abandoned for another patron further into the room.  A lannik and a dresselian who sat huddled together were passed over entirely as the second trooper started checking the people at the bar.  It was clear to Cassian that they were looking for someone.  A human someone.

Was it possible that the base had traced the hack back to Al’s terminal that quickly?  Cassian crawled further behind the bar in an effort to stay out of view while the troops advanced through the cantina.  He ended up crouched at the barkeep’s feet, which earned him nothing more than a quick blank-faced glance before Al addressed the unwelcome Stormtroopers.

“Is there something I can help you gentlemen with?  Although, I must say, enjoying one of my ales will be a challenge with those helmets on.”

“Have you seen this woman?” one trooper inquired.

Cassian let out a silent sigh of relief.  He couldn’t see the face on the holo the trooper flashed at Al from where he was crouched, but if they were looking for a woman then he was relatively safe.  That didn’t mean he wanted to introduce himself to the pair of them, but it made him breathe a little easier.

“She goes by Kestrel Dawn,” the trooper informed Al.

Cassian’s body tensed right back up at the name.  Surely his luck couldn’t be that bad.  Dawn was his ticket off this rock.  Not only would it be a waste of credits if she was caught, but he would end up having to do something drastic and probably noticeable to get offworld. Finding someone else to make him decent scandocs was out of the question.  He couldn’t delay his journey to Carida any longer.

“No, I can’t say that I have,” Al frowned at the troopers.

“If you see her, report it immediately.  She’s wanted for crimes against the Empire.”

Cassian could see Al’s hands twitch toward a blaster hidden below the bar even as his face remained neutral.  “Of course,” he answered.

Cassian didn’t rise from his crouch until several seconds had passed after he heard the telltale bootfalls leave the cantina.  He heard Al mutter, “What has that stupid girl gotten into now?” as he helped Cassian to his feet.

“Do you know where she is?” Cassian asked, careful to maintain the Alderaanian accent he had adopted with Sheb.  The barkeep eyed him suspiciously so Cassian hurried to explain.  “She’s working on something for me and I’d rather she not get arrested before she finishes.”

Al’s expression didn’t clear exactly, but he looked slightly less suspicious.  “I don’t actually,” he said.  “Don’t even have a comm code for her.  But if she gets caught because of whatever you have her working on then I will personally come after you.”

Cassian absolutely believed it.

“It shouldn’t have gotten her noticed at all, unless she’s not as good as I’ve heard.”

Al grunted in response and studied him for a moment before coming to some sort of decision.  “Get out of here, kid,” he instructed Cassian with a jerk of his head toward the backroom.  “If you see Kestrel, make sure she knows to keep her head down, or better yet, she should get herself on a ship and out of here.”

Cassian nodded his agreement to Al’s advice and took off through the backroom and into the alley beyond.  The only thing he felt positive about was that Dawn wasn’t working at the Black Bantha right now, otherwise the troopers would have found her easily.  Other than that he felt the barkeep was right.  It was high time he got off this planet.

 

***

 

Based on their meeting the previous day, Cassian got to the market square early hoping Dawn would do the same.  He kept up a careful surveillance of the area, looking for a short figure in bright colors.  He needed to find her before the Stormtroopers patrolling the streets did. It wasn’t going to be an easy task and he was half hoping she would spot him even though he blended into the crowd far more easily.

After ten minutes of circulating the square and keeping a wary eye out for the slicer he felt a firm tap at his shoulder.  He tensed up immediately, his hand automatically reaching for his blaster.  He turned to find the elusive Kestrel Dawn standing behind him, arms crossed over her chest and sly smirk on her face.  She was dressed slightly less flamboyantly today, with a dark jacket over an inconceivably red shirt.  Cassian let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding at the sight of her.  If he were the one being hunted down by Stormtroopers, he probably wouldn’t be looking so chipper about things, but at least she was there.

“I thought we said eighteen hundred?” she asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.

Cassian grabbed her arm and dragged her along his side as he kept up his steady pace through the market.  “Keep moving!” he ordered gruffly.

“Hey! Get your hands off me!” she said trying to pull free, but Cassian didn’t budge.

“Stop it! They’re looking for you,” he told her in a rush, “Do you have a scarf or something you can put over your head?”

She stopped struggling but, thankfully, she didn’t stop walking.  “What do you mean?” Dawn asked in a low voice, her eyes now focused on observing her surroundings.

“Troopers have been flashing about a holo of you all afternoon, asking for your whereabouts.”

“What? Why?” She asked as though Cassian would have an answer to that mystery.  “Wait,” she said suddenly, this time she did stop, clutching Cassian’s arm in a fierce grip, “were they looking for Aurora or Kestrel Dawn?”

“They were after you, Kestrel Dawn,” he answered, raising one eyebrow in question.

“That makes no sense,” she muttered and started walking again.

He looked at her skeptically. “You’re a slicer.”

“No, Aurora is a slicer.  There’s a difference.”

Cassian nodded his understanding.  He knew full well how an alias could take on personality quirks and habits that had nothing to do with the person underneath.  Thank goodness too, otherwise he would hate himself for half the stupid mannerisms and facial expressions his various identities had developed over the years.

“I haven’t done anything that they would come after me for,” Dawn continued. Then she frowned, “Well, nothing much.”

It was not precisely the reassurance Cassian was looking for. “We should get off the streets,” he told Dawn.

She shook her head.  “That would take too long.  We can get this done quickly. This way,” she said and hauled him between the stands of two street vendors and onto the cross street behind.  She ducked into a shallow doorway and Cassian followed.  It didn’t quite shield them from view but at least they weren’t right out in the open.  “Here. You know the drill.” She stuffed her datapad into his hands as she rooted through the pockets in her jacket for the scandocs she had made.

Cassian went through the routine of transferring his funds over to her, unconsciously registering that the account number was a different one from the previous day.  He handed back the datapad and received his new Aach Penn scandocs and identichip, everything looking professional and official.

“Excellent.  I’d say you know where to find me if you need anything else, except I may not even know where to find me.  Hopefully, they’ll give up in a week or so if they really are looking for me,” she said throwing him a skeptical eyebrow, “and I won’t have to leave yet.  I’m not done here.”

Cassian didn’t know what that meant, but she’d given him an idea. She was a slicer after all, and far more qualified to infiltrate the Imperial network than he was.  “Actually there is something…” but he trailed off as he actually thought through the practicalities.  She would have no way to contact him once he was on Kuat.  “Nevermind.  I’m leaving and you should probably leave Toprawa too.  Al the Alchemist advises it, in fact.”

She raised her eyebrows at that.  “Maybe.  What was it you needed?”

“Just information on a person.”

Dawn looked thoughtful for a moment.  “I could set up a secure dead drop and dump the information into it.  I give you the access code once you give me payment.  It’s not hard.  Who’s the person?”

“It was just a whim,” he said, waving her off.  “Something I overheard about a scientist called Galen Erso.”

Dawn went incredibly still for the space of a heartbeat, her eyes widening in astonishment, before she tried to play it off.

All of which was very fascinating to Cassian.  The girl clearly recognized the name.

“A scientist? What kind of science?” she asked.  She almost managed to sound indifferent.

Cassian didn’t believe her attempt at general disinterest, but he didn’t show it.  “He’s a crystallographer, apparently, or at least he was before he fell off the grid some years ago.”

Dawn raised a skeptical eyebrow and carefully cleared her throat before delivering her opinion.  “Well, that sounds… useful.”

“Does it?  Because I can’t see why the Empire would want a guy who studies rocks in their weapons development initiative.”

“Are you sure he’s involved in weapons research?” she asked, frowning at the thought.

“Well, not exactly.  Just something called ‘Celestial Power.’  What else would it be?” The slicer had a faraway look in her eyes and one of her hands had unconsciously moved to grasp something hanging around her neck.  Cassian was half convinced she was about to reveal some vital piece of information, but he knew better than to think he would ever come by something of that nature so easily.

At long last Dawn shrugged.  “Energy enrichment,” she surmised.  “Wasn’t there an old Imperial program by that name with the goal of bringing cheap, sustainable power to the poorer Rim worlds?”

If there was ever such a program, this was the first Cassian had ever heard of it.  In his experience the Empire did not go out of its way to help the citizens of the galaxy in any fashion.  Every resource it could get its hands on went toward augmenting its already unparalleled Imperial Fleet.

“Perhaps,” he said, letting his disbelief wash through his voice.  “It doesn’t matter anyway.  I would have no way to contact you or access the drop from Kuat anyway.”

“Sounds like one hell of a vacation you’re planning,” she said sounding like her sharp and cynical self.

“It’s going to be something,” he affirmed trying to read something in her grey-green eyes one last time.  Kestrel Dawn was brimming over with life and energy. The ever present smirk on her lips, the steady set of her shoulders, the easy grace in her limbs, but her eyes were inexplicably empty.  Something about the name Galen Erso had caused the light in her eyes to retreat.  The Intelligence Officer in him made Cassian want to tease her secrets out of her, but the practical soldier side of him knew it was not important at the moment and he had to get off Toprawa.  He took a step back into the street. “I have to go,” he said somewhat reluctantly, “Thank you for…” he didn’t know what.

“Yeah, me too,” Dawn said following him out to the street.  “I should probably—“

“There she is!” A loud, all too familiar sounding voice cut her off.  They both turned toward the armored figures standing by the vendors on the main street.  “It’s Kestrel Dawn!  Grab them!”

“Oh kriffing hell,” Dawn said with a grimace, then she took off down the street, Cassian hot on her heels.  Red blaster bolts sizzled by his ears and nipped at his feet as he ran.

They were doing well, staying ahead of the Stormtroopers, twisting their way through the city, when they rounded a corner and came face to face with a dead end.  Cassian cursed in his native Festian and Dawn let out a string of curses in Basic.

“Great!” she exclaimed.  “You help one Rebel and they come after you, blasters blazing, within seconds!”

“What? How did you—“ Cassian stopped himself before he gave anything else away.  She couldn’t know for sure that he was with the Alliance.  He was certain that he had never given any hint about his affiliations while in her presence.  He was careful to the point of paranoia about revealing his allegiance after losing too many comrades to careless talk.  “You can’t pin this on me,” he argued.  “You must have done something to get yourself noticed.”

“Not likely,” she scoffed and got right up into his face, shoving an accusing finger into his chest.  “I told you, I haven’t done anything.  I’ve been here for months flying under the radar.  No reason for that to change now, so I’m guessing you went and blabbed about me to someone you shouldn’t have.”

“Hey!  I’m getting shot at too, if you didn’t notice,” he said indignantly.  “All I want is to get off this rock alive.”

“Well it looks like we’re in the same boat now, pretty boy.”

 _Pretty boy?_ Cassian decided to let that pass without comment.  Besides, they had to get out of this alleyway alive if they were to have a hope of making it offworld.

Surprisingly, Dawn was way ahead of him.

“I’m not seeing a way out or up from this death trap,” she said with a thorough survey of the terrain. The clatter of the Stormtroopers’ boots was getting closer. “Find somewhere to hide.  I’ll head them off.”

“What? Why would I do that?”  He was a good fighter, and better with a blaster, and he was certainly no stranger to being outnumbered.

“Because they were after me.  They have no reason to suppose you stuck with me.  Hell, you probably could have melted into the crowd when they first spotted me and they wouldn’t have noticed.  But now, I want the strategic advantage.”

He couldn’t really argue with that.  If they had a shot at taking the troopers by surprise, then he could swallow his momentary indignation at being ordered to hide and do whatever would give them the best odds of getting out of this situation alive.

While Cassian hid himself behind some abandoned cargo crates and foul smelling refuse bins, he saw Kestrel Dawn tuck herself into a cranny that would afford her a good view and clear shot at the entrance to the alleyway.  Cassian approved of the placement.  It would allow her to fire on the troopers before they could even spot her and either pick them off or force them back.

As Cassian heard footsteps rounding the corner Dawn fired and there was an accompanying cry then the clatter of a heavy body falling to the floor.  Her next series of shots drove the troopers back around the corner to seek cover of their own.

“Kestrel Dawn,” he heard the tinny voice of a Stormtrooper shout.  “You are wanted for crimes against the Empire!”

“Oh please,” the girl scoffed.  “What exactly am I supposed to have done?” She fired a couple more bolts to keep the troopers at bay.

“Petty theft, trespassing, assault—“

“And attempted murder!” a second trooper interjected, firing some shots of his own at Dawn’s position.

“Attempted murder? That’s a bit far don’t you think?  It’s not my fault that lieutenant what’s-his-name can’t hold his liquor.  I’m sure it was nothing a quick trip to your fancy medbay on base couldn’t fix.”

Cassian had to hold in a groan.  Was this really happening?  He had managed to hack his way into the Imperial network without getting caught, but this girl had brought blasterfire down on them, not for illegal slicing, but for drinking some officer under the table?  If he wasn’t so annoyed he might have laughed.  This was why he preferred to work alone.  People inevitably did stupid things that got them noticed.

“You are under arrest,” the voice of a trooper called again, vitriol in every word.

“You know, as enticing as prison sounds,” the girl said airily, “it’s really not the direction I want my life to take right now.  Wouldn’t you agree, pretty boy?”

Cassian took that as his cue to break cover and come out firing as Dawn did the same.  There were four troopers still standing.  He took down one immediately and managed to knock the blaster from the hands of another with a well-placed shot.  Dawn also managed to take down one of the figures in white plastoid before moving in close and attacking with a pair of truncheons that seemed to appear out of nowhere. He watched as she twisted and turned, kicked and ducked, and hammered at least one of her opponents into unconsciousness.  Cassian emotionlessly fired a shot into the downed trooper to make certain that he would stay down.

When he turned his attention back to Dawn and the one remaining Stormtrooper he found them locked in hand to hand combat.  The copper haired girl had lost one of her truncheons, but she barely seemed to notice as she landed a forceful blow to the trooper’s unguarded neck between chest plate and helmet.  He tried to get a bead on the white armored figure, but the two were moving too unpredictably for him to risk shooting without hitting the girl. 

Of course, he could just shoot them both.  He had his new scandocs and the girl was nothing but trouble.  He could walk away from the whole encounter with no one the wiser as to his involvement then board his transport as planned and get on with his work for the Alliance.

All it would take was two blaster bolts.

But that didn’t feel right.  What would be the point of paying the girl her exorbitant fee then killing her?

He waited for a clean shot, keeping a careful eye for an opening that would allow him to help in any other way.  Delivering a quick jab and a sweep of the leg, Dawn managed to bring the trooper to his knees and get a handle on his helmet and started to twist, but a sharp backward jerk brought the trooper’s head free of the helmet in Dawn’s grasp.  Dawn stumbled back a step and seemed to freeze at the sight of the trooper’s short brown hair and fine features, currently twisted into a snarl.  Before the woman, the _trooper_ , could take advantage of Dawn’s momentary lapse, Cassian brought up his blaster and fired twice, eliminating the threat.

“What was that?” he asked angrily while stowing his blaster back on his hip.  “Just because that trooper was female doesn’t mean she wasn’t going to kill you!”

Dawn blinked once, threw the helmet away from her, and then turned blazing eyes on Cassian. “Yes, thank you, I know very well just how deadly a woman can be.” Her voice was level and stone cold.

“Then what happened?” he asked, still heated.  Cassian didn’t know why he cared so much.  This girl was nothing to him or the Alliance.  If she wanted to get herself killed it was no problem of his.

Dawn glanced at the white clad woman lying face down in the dirt of the alleyway. She turned away. “She looked like someone I used to know,” she said softly.

Cassian couldn’t relate.  He had no time for emotions.  He hadn’t had that luxury since he was six.

“Do you make a regular habit of befriending Imperial troops?” he asked in disgust.

She cut her gaze back to him the anger once again radiating off her.  “No more than I do befriending Rebels,” she said.  There was a challenge in her eyes and in the set of her jaw, daring Cassian to respond to the accusation.

There was nothing that he could say that wouldn’t give himself away so he remained silent and matched her glare with one of his own.

Despite her diminutive stature, the anger, rage, and, to his surprise, pain that he could sense pouring off her made Kestrel Dawn feel every inch as tall as he was.

Cassian looked away first.  “We need to move before more of them show up,” he said walking to the mouth of the alleyway to check if anyone had already been drawn to the sounds of blasterfire. “I mapped a way to the central hangar without passing through the security checkpoints earlier today.” He glanced over his shoulder and saw Dawn nod once, her face stony as she fell in beside him when he moved away from the fallen troopers.

His chosen route through the city wasn’t easy by any means, but the girl didn’t protest once.  She easily kept up as he wound in and out of buildings and up and down balconies, or across rooftops.  She never let go of her tight lipped scowl, remaining a tense coil of energy at his side.  He eventually brought them to a stop on a high roof overlooking the spaceport just across the way.  Dawn crouched down and removed a pair of quadnocs from a pouch at her hip and proceeded survey the landscape.  Unasked, Cassian stood over her and silently watched her back.

It wasn’t until his gaze made it back to the girl that he noticed the strip of cloth wound untidily around her upper arm.  He was almost certain that it hadn’t been there earlier.  She must have gotten hit by a blaster bolt or incurred some other injury during the scuffle with the squad of troopers.  He was impressed by the level of determination and sheer stubbornness of the girl.  She hadn’t asked to slow down or made Cassian wait while she tended to the wound, instead she had quietly bound herself up while making their way through the city then unflinchingly muscled her way up buildings and down catwalks.  Really, there was something quite admirable about her cheek and fighting spirit.

“Well,” she said after a few minutes of observation, “You were right about the coast being clear of troopers from here to the service entrance.  If we go in the back way we can avoid the final checkpoint at the main entrance, and I think I’ve found a ship that will work.”  Before Cassian could ask what she meant, Dawn had stashed her quadnocs cutting off Cassian’s chance to take a look for himself, and headed toward a drainage pipe they would have to shimmy down to reach street level.  He followed her automatically, barely registering that at this point he most certainly could chose to go his own way and leave the girl to her own devices.  He owed her no loyalty after all and she had already shown an impulsiveness that was likely to get him killed if he remained with her.  Nevertheless, he stayed by her side as they cautiously and casually made their way toward the open door of the hangar’s service entrance.

The hangar was enormous with ships of all kinds spread throughout the space.  The areas between ships were a jumble of fuel lines, cargo lifts, maintenance droids, and creatures of several species debating repairs or checking docking records.  In other words, it was just like every other spaceport Cassian had ever been in.  As he followed Dawn through the carefully controlled chaos he spotted the civilian transport ship he was supposed to take to Carida.  Taking public transport meant it wouldn’t be a direct jump to the Academy planet, but he didn’t really mind the extra hours to prepare this time.  He’d gotten more than he bargained for on Toprawa and he could use the downtime to refocus.  He couldn’t afford to let anything distract him while he was in the Core or he would be dead inside a month.  This wasn’t just any deep cover mission that Draven had set him. 

Cassian was heading to Carida to pose as a recent Imperial Academy graduate, ripe for the plucking by the Imperial Security Bureau, the most ruthless division of the Imperial government.  They were responsible for rooting out insurgency and ensuring loyalty among the Empire’s citizens as well as its own agents and contractors.  His mission was to spend six months as an ISB agent stationed at the Kuat Drive Yards to learn all he could while appearing to keep others from leaking secrets.  Draven had warned him that he would have to go through the rigorous ISB training that all recruits received so that he would know the jargon and the protocols so as not risk giving himself away.  When Cassian had expressed his doubt about not being found out amidst an organization dedicating to eradicating the Rebellion, Draven had said, “They would never think to look within their own ranks.  As long as you don’t make any waves, you’ll be fine.” 

Given the delicate nature of his cover for the next several months, he wasn’t only looking forward to the long flight to Carida, he needed it.  He needed to wipe the frustrations of Toprawa from his system and that included the determined expression and blazing eyes of a young slicer.  If his thoughts weren’t fully on his mission by the time he landed on Carida, he would be in trouble before he even put on the uniform that would serve as a second skin for the next eight months of his life.

“There it is,” Dawn said breaking through Cassian’s reverie.  She waved him forward then crouched behind a stack of crates near a wall of the hangar.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Cassian asked.

“Our way off this backwater planet,” she said using her chin to gesture toward a ship some twenty paces from the crates they were using as cover.

“You want to steal a cargo ship that could belong to anyone from some hapless individual to Black Sun?” he asked incredulously.  “I think I’ll stick to my original plan of taking a public transport.”

She turned to him with a look of derision Cassian felt he didn’t deserve at all.  “It’s not Black Sun.  They wouldn’t be operating a small time freighter this far from the Core, especially not on an Imperial occupied planet.”

Was she really that naïve? This was exactly the kind of place that Black Sun would operate.  Cassian knew they practically lived in the Empire’s back pocket and as a world located right on a major trade route, Toprawa was the perfect place for Black Sun to set up an under the radar base of some kind.  Something of his thoughts must have shown on his face because Dawn rolled her eyes at him.

“Don’t worry, it’s not Black Sun, I promise.  Even I’m not that crazy,” she said, trying to reassure him.

“How would you know?  It’s not like they emblazon their name on every one of their people’s ships. That would kind of defeat the purpose,” Cassian argued.

Dawn shrugged. “Black Sun might not, but their front companies do.  They have to _appear_ legitimate to make a good deal of their money, and I know what most of those company logos look like. Besides,” she said, leveling her gaze at him, “they’re not the only game in town and you know it.  Especially not in this region of the galaxy.  It’s far more likely that the ship belongs to some small time outfit and I’d much rather take my chances on them than the Empire.  I mean, come on, the ship is completely unguarded!  Black Sun would never be so careless.”           

“And who’s going to fly it if I don’t go with you?” he asked her.

“Hey, I may not ever be a fighter pilot, but I can definitely fly a freighter.  I had to learn the start-up sequences and flight controls for dozens of different haulers and freighters, even a corvette or two. I think I can handle an Allanar N3 light freighter.”

Considering Cassian couldn’t even identify the make or model of the freighter he was inclined to believe her.  He was starting to get intensely, dangerously curious about who exactly Kestrel Dawn was and how she had developed such an interesting skillset that seemed to include slicing, pickpocketing, fighting, and flying.  Although, when he thought about it like that, it actually sounded remarkably similar to his own upbringing in the Rebellion.

He suddenly couldn’t help but wonder just what she was doing out here on the fringes of civilized space as a slicer who worked in seedy bars.  The girl certainly had no love of the Empire and was clearly more competent than half the people that made up the forces of the Rebellion.  She was quick, intelligent, resourceful, a fighter with a decent tactical mind, and she knew her way around a data terminal.  The Alliance could use ten of her.

Without stopping to think about it first, Cassian put the question to her while she was staring at the activity surrounding the freighter she had marked as her target.  He could see her eyes following the private security forces as they made their rounds through the hangar floor.

“You know, I have some friends who could really benefit from your skills,” he told her.

Dawn scoffed.  “You mean the Rebellion? No thanks, they couldn’t afford me and it’s really not my fight.”

“Not your fight?” He inexplicably threw caution to the winds not bothering to deny being part of the Alliance. That kind of statement always got Cassian’s back up.  If you lived in this galaxy it was your fight.  Pretending the Empire’s many atrocities didn’t exist wouldn’t reverse the death count.  “How can you say that?”

“Easily.  I keep my head down and my nose clean and the Empire looks right over me.”

“You call this keeping your nose clean?” he asked, gesturing at the general situation of having taken down a squad of Stormtroopers and then fleeing into the shadows.

Dawn’s mouth thinned into a hard line and her eyes narrowed. “I’m having a bad day.”

Cassian let out a derisive snort and turned back to face the freighter, letting the subject drop.  He could tell that pushing her would be unwise in their present circumstances.  They were trying not to be noticed by the security forces in the hangar and getting into a heated debate about wartime morals would not do them any favors.

“So, are we going to get out of here or what?” she asked him with fire in her eyes.

Cassian reminded himself to breathe and not let emotions get the better of him.  He wasn’t out of danger yet.  “Yes, but I don’t think stealing a ship in this instance is a good idea.  It will draw too much attention.  You don’t want to get shot down or be followed.”

“How are they going to follow me if I have their ship?” she asked with a smirk.

“They could have friends planetside.  It’s not a good idea, too risky.”

She eyed him, something akin to disappointment on her face.  “You, Aach Penn from Alderaan, will also never be a fighter pilot.  Sometimes a risky maneuver is what gives you the best shot.”

That was true enough for the pilots he knew.  Wedge, Janson, and even General Merrick would certainly agree in any case, but for Cassian caution was the watchword of his career.  Too many risks meant getting caught.  Death by Imperial interrogation was a long and painful process compared with getting shot down in a dogfight, and Cassian fervently hoped to avoid the experience.

The stubborn set of Dawn’s jaw told Cassian that whatever he said was unlikely to sway her from her chosen course of action.  It seemed they had come to a parting of the ways.

“It’s not _my_ best option,” he said, careful to place the emphasis on _my._

Dawn nodded her understanding.  “But it is mine.  Those Stormtroopers probably alerted security and any public transports to be on the lookout for me, so stealing that freighter is the less dangerous of the two options,” she said and turned all her attention back to the ship.

Cassian hesitated, not quite wanting to just walk away without saying anything, even if he knew he needed to.  He shouldn’t be anywhere in the vicinity when Dawn made her move.

“There may be someone on guard inside the ship even if no one’s outside,” he warned.

She turned to him with an expression that almost made him smile.  “Yeah.  I figured that out all on my own, surprisingly enough.” She rolled her eyes and rose from her crouch, but she looked back at him before breaking cover.  “Thanks.  And good luck with whatever you’re doing on Kuat.  If that’s even where you’re going,” she said then strode out from behind the crates and walked right up to the freighter as though she owned the thing.

Cassian still couldn’t make himself leave to find his transport, despite only having thirty more minutes to get on board.  Some part of him wanted to make sure the girl actually managed to get offworld without crashing and burning.  He was too far away to hear anything going on inside the ship, but Dawn didn’t reappear unconscious and bruised, in stuncuffs, or in any other form, neither, for that matter, did anyone else.  Not two minutes after she had casually waltzed onto the ship, the boarding ramp retracted into the base of the cargo bay and the sublights hummed to life.

The girl was good, no doubts there, and incredibly lucky not to have encountered more of the ship’s crew milling about just inside the bay door or some kind of security protocol programmed into the flight control console.  It was remarkable how careless some people seemed to be these days.

The ship rose a few feet off the ground on repulsors and came about.  In the viewport of the cockpit Cassian could see the dark shape of Kestrel Dawn throw him a sloppy mock salute before pointing the nose of the freighter skyward and letting the engines roar to full power.

Cassian actually laughed in genuine delight at the ease and swagger with which Dawn had effected her escape.  The sheer novelty of the fact almost shocked him back into silence.  The last time he had let loose like that Draven had caught him in the kitchens of Base One after hours, humming while he cooked.  The man had looked completely poleaxed and turned on his heel to exit through the mess hall as quickly as he could.  The ability to make Cassian laugh was a rare skill that few possessed.  Strange that this girl he’d barely known for a day seemed to have it.

Whoever Kestrel Dawn was beneath the surface, Cassian doubted he would ever meet anyone like her again.  If there had been more time or different circumstances, he would have tried harder to recruit her for the Rebellion.  She would have fit right in with the somewhat ragtag group of soldiers, pilots, and techs fighting to free the galaxy.  Instead she was fleeing Toprawa without a backward glance to go do who knew what.  It was such a waste.

There was nothing Cassian could do about it now.  He had plenty enough to be worrying about without concerning himself with how others spent their lives.  He had a transport to catch and an important mission to prepare for. If he could find a way to send a message to Draven about Galen Erso before he was obliged to don the peaked cap of an Imperial cadet, so much the better.  Otherwise, he’d have to sit on the information for the six to eight months he was undercover and radio silent.  Kestrel Dawn with her fierce grey-green eyes and sardonic wit would have to disappear from his mind just as her ship had disappeared from the sky.  At least for once, Cassian would be left with a few pleasant memories from his time on Toprawa.


End file.
